Sand Creek students hear from Holocaust survivor

Friday

Jan 11, 2013 at 4:00 PM

By John MulcahyDaily Telegram Staff Writer

SAND CREEK — Sixth-grade students at Sand Creek’s Ruth McGregor Elementary School heard a first-hand account Thursday about one of the most horrendous aspects of the Nazi and World War II era: the Holocaust.

Martin Lowenberg of Southfield described to the students how he had grown up in the village of Schenklengsfeld, Germany, which he compared to the area around Sand Creek, peaceful, pretty and close to other small towns and villages.

“It was a beautiful village; people enjoyed living there,” Lowenberg said. He was invited to the school by sixth-grade teacher Shana Love, whose students have been studying the Holocaust.

He and his family were “part of the community” that included Protestants, Catholics and Jews, Lowenberg said.

All of that began to change with Adolph Hitler’s rise to head of the German government in 1933, when Lowenberg was 5 years old.

“He hated people. He hated certain religions,” Lowenberg said. “He had a really small mind, but yet again, people liked what he was saying.”

Lowenberg described the escalating harassment, abuse, deprivation and brutalization suffered by his family and other Jews, along with members of some other religions and minorities. His family’s home was burned by a gang in 1933, immediately plunging the family into poverty, though friends helped them rebuild, he said.

An older brother and sister suffered verbal attacks and left Germany for Palestine, now Israel. He and one of his sisters were forced from a sports organization.

In 1936, when he was 8 years old, his teacher at the village school accused Lowenberg of sticking out his tongue at a picture of Hitler in the classroom, and called on four older boys to beat Lowenberg, then forced him to sit on a board with nails sticking out of it.

His parents then sent him to a Jewish-run boarding school for two years in another town, where his only communication with his family was by postcard and he was allowed to come home only once, in the summer of 1937.

In 1938, the family was forced to move to another town, Fulda, where he attended another Jewish school. He was at that school on Nov. 9, 1938, when rocks began coming through the school windows, the school and synagogue were burned, and people were beaten in the streets, all part of the infamous Kristallnacht attack on Jewish people, businesses and institutions.

Following that, Lowenberg’s father was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp for a month. The family, along with other Jews, was oppressed with special taxes, stripped of citizenship, accosted on the street and had difficulty getting food.

Lowenberg’s father was forced to work digging ditches.

On Dec. 8, 1941, Lowenberg and his family were deported in a railroad freight car to a ghetto in Riga, Latvia, where conditions were dire.

The last time Lowenberg saw his parents or his younger twin brothers was when he was 15 and was taken to a labor camp. In 1943, his parents and twin brothers were taken to the Auschwitz death camp, where they were killed.

Lowenberg and his sister, Eva, survived a series of labor camps, were reunited after the war and eventually joined their remaining siblings in the United States.

Lowenberg’s main message for the children was not to hate, but to love and respect other people.

“If you know that, you will know a lot,” he said.

Answering students’ questions, Lowenberg said that because he was in labor camps, not death camps, he never had a tattoo and never saw a gas chamber or a cremation oven; it would have been very difficult for his family to hide in Germany to escape the Nazis; and he has been back to his home town four times and given presentations there.

After his presentation, Lowenberg said he normally does not speak to children so young, but did so this time because they already had been studying the Holocaust and knew what happened.

He gives 70 to 100 presentations a year about his experiences, including about once a week at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Lowenberg said.

“I feel it is very important to teach these youngsters first-hand what happened during that particular period,” Lowenberg said.